Rodvik has blogged with too much bold and spelling realise with a Z. This from a man who likes curries and football is not good, he needs a visit home! The blog post is a chirpy upbeat post reporting the best number of new signups for four years in August and that Linden homes are now at record levels too.
Other news includes trying to improve service response times with expanded staffing, which is good news and viewer changes to merge advanaced and basic modes, which is a hmmm we’ll wait and see. The biggest positive about this post is that it didn’t include and price rises or majorly bad news, although traditionally they come at the end of October, full sim price rises were announced near the end of October 2006 and The Openspace fiassco kicked off near the end of October 2008, not until we’re well into November will we be able to breathe a sight of relief!
The big news for me though was the talk of artificial life and NPC’s, although testing won’t start until December on this, it’s something I’m keen to see.
RodVilla announced:
“Over the next few months (with testing most likely starting in December), we will be rolling out a series of more advanced features. These will make the creation of artificial life and artificial people much smoother. For starters, we’ll unveil a new, robust pathfinding system that will allow objects to intelligently navigate around the world avoiding obstacles. Imagine being able to create advanced pets, creatures or even a living town where non-player characters are walking about. Combined with the experience tools I mentioned above, it should soon be possible to create more advanced MMORPG’s or interactive experiences which use AI right within Second Life.”
This could be extremely positive, although as testing isn’t starting until December I’m going to have to wait a while, like a kid waiting for Christmas. One thing not announced by Rodvik, has been announced by Falcon Linden in the forum, via a post from Oskar Linden, which I found out about after Chalice Yao posted about it over at SLUniverse!!! I’ve found about this in such a convoluted route that I’ve forgotten what I’m talking about … oh wait, Keyframing! Oskars post on behalf of Falcon tells us:
“I’m happy to let you all know that llSetKeyframedAnimation (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetKeyframedAnimation) is now available on two adjacent regions on Aditi: “Sandbox – Bispinor” and “Sandbox – Weapons testing”. The wiki page includes a couple very simple examples of how to use the new function, as well as the API documentation itself.
Testing/Reporting:
Because of severe time constraints on this project, no additional features will be added at this time. However, the API is constructed in such a way that it should be highly extensible in the future if additional features or minor fixes are required. Accordingly, any bug report filed that isn’t a showstopper will likely not be addressed before roll-out. Any bugs that /are/ reported as showstoppers should meet one of the following criteria:
Breakage of existing content
Creation of a misfeature that will prevent future changes to the function (future changes will use additional options flags to opt in, so to satisfy this criterion, the bug probably has to relate to the parsing of the options list)
Complete un-usability for the intend purpose (e.g., highly unpredictable behavior when used according to the spec).
Feature requests are welcome and should be clearly marked as such and flagged as low priority.
If you encounter a behavior that isn’t specified in the wiki docs but appears reasonable, please add it to the wiki rather than file a bug report. It is likely intended behavior I just didn’t have an opportunity to document.
All issues should be reported under the the Scripting project at jira.secondlife.com.
Finally:
Have fun. Build cool stuff!”
My reading of that is that you will be able to make a prim move in a set route or rotate around, I’m still wondering if this has anything to do with the proposed NPC feature, at first I thought it did but reading Rodvik’s blog about testing not starting until December I’m not so sure, it looks like an interesting feature though so I’ll keep an eye on it.
I’m quite positive at the moment about the direction Second Life is heading, however as I said earlier, we’re still in early October, hang onto your hats!